‘MTV generation’ tunes in to web: a Hong Kong show for Indonesian video art trio
Just as video killed the radio star, the internet has made music television channels less relevant, so Bandung collective’s stop-motion video art has evolved to respond to ‘nowness’ of the web
The usual labels for contemporary Indonesian artists are often tied to that watershed moment in the country’s recent history: the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
The three members of Tromarama, the Bandung-based collective recently in Hong Kong with new works exploring the concept of reality in the age of social media, are certainly products of the post-reformasi era that has seen the country open up and steadily democratise over the past 17 years. But they would add another description for themselves: the three thirty-somethings are also the MTV generation.
“Growing up, we were mainly influenced by films and music video directors. Because of MTV, which we watched on television at home, we saw how music videos were really experimental,” says Herbert Hans, the 31-year-old who formed the collective with his partner Febie Babyrose and high school friend Ruddy Hatumena.
In 2006, they were finishing their respective degrees in design, advertising and print-making at the prestigious Institut Teknologi Bandung when they decided to collaborate on an extracurricular video assignment. The result was a stunning piece of animation using nothing but a video camera and a lot of woodcut panels.
Serigala Militia, created for a song by Indonesian heavy metal band Seringai, was shown at the 2008 Singapore Biennale and the trio refer to the making of it as “traumatic”, a moment when it all clicked, and a moment that gave birth to Tromarama.